Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a diagnosis support apparatus, a method of controlling the same, a storage medium and, more particularly, to a diagnosis support apparatus which provides information for supporting medical diagnosis, a method of controlling the same, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
In the medical field, a doctor displays the medical images obtained by imaging a patient on a monitor, interprets the medical images displayed on the monitor, and observes the state of a morbid portion and temporal changes in it. Apparatuses which generate this type of medical images include, for example, an X-ray CT (Computed Tomography) apparatus, MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) apparatus, and ultrasonic apparatus. Each diagnosis (imaging diagnosis) using these medical images can be divided into the step of finding an abnormal shade or the like from the medical images as diagnosis targets and obtaining the characteristics of the shade and the step of performing differential diagnosis to identify the shade.
Conventionally, there has been developed a medical diagnosis support apparatus which infers the identification of an abnormal shade by using the characteristics (interpretation findings) of the shade as input information and presents the resultant information for the purpose of supporting differential diagnosis by doctors. For example, there has been proposed an apparatus which calculates the probability of a given shade in a chest X-ray CT image being a malignant tumor and the probability of the shade being a benign tumor and presents the resultant information. In general, the following is a proper procedure when using such an apparatus in an actual clinical site. First of all, the doctor performs differential diagnosis. The doctor then refers to the inference result output from the medical diagnosis support apparatus as reference information.
A problem in this case is that if there are many pieces of information which have not been input (to be referred to as “non-input information” hereinafter), the accuracy of inference by the medical diagnosis support apparatus is low. Attempts have therefore been made to obtain more reliable inference results by making an apparatus select non-input information necessary for inference and prompt the doctor to add the information. Prompting the doctor to check non-input information greatly influencing an inference result allows one to expect an improvement of the certainty factor of diagnosis by the doctor himself/herself. In addition, there can be expected a reduction of diagnosis errors caused by interpretation oversights.
For example, Japanese Patent No. 3226400 has disclosed a technique of selecting and presenting non-input information to be noted from the inference result (current inference result) obtained by an apparatus based on information which has already been input (to be referred to as “already input information” hereinafter) and the inference result obtained when non-input information is added to already input information. This technique is designed to calculate the degree of influence of each piece of non-input information with respect to a current inference result and to present non-input information exhibiting a high influence degree. This makes it possible to present non-input information which greatly influences the inference result obtained by the apparatus based on already input information.
When the apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 3226400 presents non-input information to be noted, the doctor as a user determines by himself/herself whether the information exists in a medical image, by interpreting the original image. At this time, there is no clue presented, other than the original image, by which the doctor determines whether the information exists, and hence it sometimes takes much time for the doctor to perform the determination, or he/she sometimes cannot properly perform the determination.
In consideration of the above problem, the present invention provides a technique of allowing a doctor to efficiently determine the presence/absence of non-input information to be noted.